What information are they really going to get from a phone that they can't get somewhere else?

Call history is going to be available from the carrier. Message history from the carrier. Email is stored on a server somewhere. All those cloud apps are on a server somewhere. And if you've got a wipe function for your phone.. isn't it likely you have a backup of your phone somewhere.. that could be retrieved for analysis?

That happened to a friend of mine. She was out with friends and wasn't drinking. Someone passed her shots to pass down the table. Of course, someone was taking pictures and guess what? Yep, the picture of her with the two shots got on her friends Facebook page. She had a Facebook page too which was linked to her friends.... Oy!

Now, let me ask you this: if I was in the UK, and shot a missile at the U.S., should I still be tried in the UK? Based on your arguments, the answer is yes.

Quite naturally. The UK does have laws against such things.

You send the criminals to the other country to be tried and sentenced in order to send a message to the other government that, "Even though this person committed a crime against you, it was not supported by our government and we bear you no ill will."

And prosecuting and putting said person in prison will not do that? I'm not following here. Usually, prosecuting someone and locking them away is a standard way of a government saying "We don't approve of what you did.".

There is some sort of group-think amongst slashdot readers that computer crimes are not crimes at all and should readily be forgiven.

No, but they guy's been in jail for a couple of years now without trial, for something that he could easily be prosecuted for in the UK.

I am saying that he is hardly innocent, and that, at the very least, the UK should give him a token jail sentence as a gesture of good will towards the U.S.

He's been locked up for a couple of frickin' years now. If they put him on trial today and give hime a "token" jail sentence, he'll be out tomorrow for time already served.

We haven't added to the real grid capacity in the last 40 years or so. We have built small "peaker" plants to try to keep up with periodic loads and with the shutting down of most industry in the US we have managed to rearrange the load pretty well. But we are pretty close to the edge now, as the whole deregulation scene showed in California. Yes, it can be managed better than they were doing, but electricity doesn't grow on trees.

Oh, and whatever the plan was with the peeker plants it didn't turn out that way. They have been enlarged as much as they can and run continuously now.

If only we could get China to make electricity for us as well as everything else.

It's disappointing that they're using a home-grown management software instead of BOINC like many of the other distributed computing projects. I, for one, would be much more likely to add to the effort if I didn't have to worry about another piece of software and how it shared resources with the Einstein and Rosetta I'm already running.